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Yep. My dog tags had my SSN on them, which I found to be completely ridiculous, as did my military ID for a while. They started issuing cards with an EDIPI on

Yep. My dog tags had my SSN on them, which I found to be completely ridiculous, as did my military ID for a while. They started issuing cards with an EDIPI on them relatively recently, which is a step in the right direction, but there's still a lot of work to do.

stonogo 11y ago
When that policy was enacted we were still living in the world where the SSN was not the primary means of personal identification. Social security cards used to explicitly say they were not to be used for personal identification, recently enough that mine does. The DOD originally switched to the SSN from the previous service numbers, as in "name rank and serial number". It was a convenience measure, since the service number system was arcane. Service numbers were also public record, and I've read documents indicating that social security numbers were not considered sensitive information (notwithstanding the fact that the DOD didn't have the concept of PII formalized back then). Should the DOD have moved back to another serial number system sooner? Possibly. I'm amazed that they're moving at all.